At Hallelujah Diet, our mission is to provide the guidance, support, community and products to enable you and the people you care about to experience the healing and healthy benefits of a clean food, mostly-raw, plant-based diet and lifestyle. When my dad created this company more than 20 years ago, he and Rhonda wanted everyone to discover what they had discovered: a diet and lifestyle that enabled them to regain youthful vitality, energy and well being. The one thing that hasn’t changed at Hallelujah Diet over the past two decades is our dedication to you and your health. But we realized recently that, to fully achieve that mission, we needed to do something that had never been done in the industry before: scientific testing of competing products that all claim to be raw, unheated foods. The purpose of the testing is to establish an industry standard for evaluating the quality of juice powders and whole-food concentrates.
Why is this necessary? Have you ever stepped inside a health foods or vitamin store or surfed the web to look for the best barley grass juice powder, carrot or beet juice powder or raw superfood powder? If so, you were no doubt quickly overwhelmed and confused. So many competing products claim to do the same thing—and to contain the same unheated ingredients—but do they? Are they really raw or just pretending to be?
To answer this question and others, we created a raw foods lab to test products to see which ones are worth your money. We wanted the initial round of testing to answer this question: Which raw whole-food concentrates have the highest enzymatic activity? The food in the produce section of your local grocery store is obviously raw. What isn’t obvious is whether raw powders and whole-food concentrates on the store’s shelves are truly raw. This question can only be answered with scientific testing. This, of course, is a crucial question because a raw whole-food concentrate’s ability to have a positive impact on your health depends on its enzymatic activity. This, in turn, depends on how the concentrate was processed and whether the heat-sensitive nutrients survived the process. If they didn’t, they’re not much good to you. In other words, you could be wasting your money on “raw” products that aren’t what they claim to be. And you need juice powders and whole-food concentrates that work because you can’t get all the living nutrition you need from even the best diet of raw foods. To minimize risk of illness and disease, we all need to maximize consumption of living nutrients from a raw diet and juice powders and whole-food concentrates that are truly raw. Dr. Michael Donaldson, PhD, our research director, initially tested six competing products to determine enzymatic activity (if any) for five different enzymes. In all five enzyme categories, BarleyMax Grass Juice Powders came out on top.
